Deeper Focus - Plan

My plan for Experimental Animation is to continue working on the oil pastel scenes for my Grad Film, Schism. I'm very attached to the texture of the oil pastels and I have created a series of sketches for possible scenes to experiment with:

The sketches were completed fairly quickly but they represent environments that I wish to explore in my film. Each pastel drawing holds the possibility for movement, and I'd like to experiment with boiling the textures inside of an entire frame. 

I've been exploring the possibility of animating my grandparents as characters in my film. Here are some character sketches and a GIF of a possible scene to complete this semester.

Messy Reflection

The Messy Series of animation experiments was an important undertaking while I started working on the development of my Senior Grad Project this year. I'm going to take this opportunity to reflect on the progress that was made and look forward to what the next round of experiments will bring.

I really felt that the Messy Series was successful. I developed the very specific goal to animate with oil pastels as I formulated the scope of the projects. I've always been drawn to the way that oil pastels can be used to capture light and form in static drawings and I wanted to bring that quality to my time-based work.

Throughout the Messy Series I tried my best to explore openly with the mediums while also making conscious decisions to eliminate variables in order to create a focus in the work. For instance, when I developed the method of back lighting the work, while using orange paper and beige felt to simultaneously warm the light and dull the piece, I knew that I had created a lighting style that was satisfactory. From that point forward I decided to leave that lighting process untouched and focus on the how the oil pastels responded to the acetate and glass.

Having difficulty applying the oil pastel to the glass was by far the biggest surprise in the process. I was so certain that by spending the time to prepare a glass surface for animation I would be furthering my progress with the oil pastels. I was dumbfounded when all my planning and preparation didn't work. Sometimes you learn the most about your work when you least expect to.

If I were to continue the Messy Series at this point I would definitely start to work with particular character styles and a different array of movements. My goals would be threefold: how to best represent the human figure with this technique, how the pastel reacts to different types of animation (fast movement versus slow movement), and a deeper focus on lighting and colour.

I know that I'm going to continue working with oil pastel as I develop my Senior Grad Project this semester but for the next series of experiments I'm going to step away from this work and try something new. My focus will be as follows:

To experiment with paper cutout animation.  I want to animate the physical pieces of paper with natural light but I also want to digitally composite the pieces in After Effects. Perhaps I can run a comparison of the two production methods and see what will work best for my future work.

To incorporate painted and photographed texture in the cutout animation.

To work on a title sequence for my Senior Grad Project, thus introducing narrative and sound to the experimentation process.

Messy 3

Grease Pencil

Experimental: Messy 3 Grease Pencil from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

Oil Pastel 

Experimental: Messy 3 Oil Pastel from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

This was my final week of oil pastel animation tests. I used the same materials and lighting setup as my previous tests so the experimentation was focused on how best to use the pastels to create the animation style I wanted.

In my work on Messy 2.5 I was having trouble getting the pastel to hold onto the hard, flexible plastic, so I thought, "well maybe it will stick better if I have something harder I can push into."

thus, glass!

This worked out terribly.

The oil pastel just wouldn't adhere to the glass at all.

After realising the initial test was doomed to failure I decided to just run a new animation test with a grease pencil to see how that looked. The movement wasn't very planned out so the animation doesn't have any gravity to it, but I can see how the grease pencil might come in handy for future work.

My next thought was to get some really soft plastic sheets to work with. If hard makes things worse then surely soft will make things better?

This was sound logic. 

I love how the final result looks and the oil pastel took to the plastic really easily. This whole time I've been looking for a way to achieve this aesthetic without the physical work being to much of a burden on my hands and this was the closest I've gotten to a quick, easy style. In this test I would scratch away at the edges of the pastel while working in a new layer of colour (mostly white) on top of the existing oil pastel. I'm very satisfied with the result, but I also recognise that I need to think about how I'm going to composit this type of work into larger scenes.

As for what comes next, I expect to start experimenting with paper puppets and compositing in After Effects this week.